Obscenity and marginality

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ABSTRACTI explore the antinomy of where indecency belongs – in the centre or at the margins of discourse? – and reconsider the concept of obscenity based on a particular sense of the margin that has informed its function in literature and law. How can a public discourse address what is by definition to be kept at the margins? Is it possible to quote obscene speech without being guilty of the same offence? May decorum – in legal and literary genres – be breached for a higher good? These questions have challenged civic-minded humanists since antiquity and English and American judges since the early eighteenth century when the common law began to regulate obscene libel. I examine, therefore, in selected legal cases and theoretical reflections, two rival perspectives: the position, represented by Milton, that the unseemly ought to be confronted directly (‘righteous indecency’), as well as the viewpoint, articulated in The Port-Royal Logic, that we ought to favour euphemism or other figures of avoidance (‘evasion of infamy’). In the courtroom, the debate between exposure and shrouding of indecency creates what could be called the problem of the complicit censor: when judges desire to keep the records pristine and their self-presentation august notwithstanding an obligation to evaluate the specific facts at issue. This quandary, a choice between two fraught approaches to obscenity, plays out both in the pivotal opinion in Regina v Hicklin and within its very object of adjudication, The Confessional Unmasked.